Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday July 02, 2014 @07:59PM
from the check-it-out dept.

MojoKid writes One of the trickiest aspects to launching a new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't willing to pay for new equipment. This is the crux of the issue with respect to the ARMv8 architecture and enabling development for 64-bit Android platforms. As such ARM is readying their Juno development platform that combines several of ARM's most advanced technologies on a single board. The product supports big.Little in an asymmetric configuration; each board ships with two Cortex-A57s, four Cortex-A53s, and a modest Mali T-624 core. All this hardware needs an OS to run on — which is why ARM is announcing a 64-bit port of Android as part of this new development board. By including AOSP support as well as additional hooks and features from Linaro, ARM wants Juno to be a sort-of one-stop shopping product for anyone who needs to test, prototype, or design a 64-bit product for the ARM ecosystem. The Android flavor that's coming over is based on Linaro Stable Kernel 3.10. At launch, Juno will support OpenGL-ES 3.0, on-chip thermal and power management, up to 8GB of RAM (12.8GB/s of bandwidth), an optional FPGA, and USB 2.0. OpenCL 1.1 will be added in a future product update. The project is positioned as a joint ARM / Linaro launch with ARM handling the hardware and Linaro taking responsibility for the software stack.

What's special about a 64-bit ARM processor? Haven't they been in iPhone 5S phones for almost a year now?

Well, Apple pretty much skunked everyone, because the roadmaps for 64-bit ARM processors had them sampling middle of 2014, for release end of 2014. These were roadmaps published by Qualcomm, Broadcom and everyone else.

So Apple pretty much got a year and a half head start (devices weren't to ship until mid 2015).

Oh, Android for 64-bit ARM wasn't supposed to be out until end of 2014, either.

Which meant if you really wanted, you shouldn't buy a phone in 2014 because what made the iPhone and iPad so fast WAS 64-bit. ARMv8 is much more efficient - 32 bit code gets a minor speedup, but the 64-bit stuff runs WAY faster.